Chapter 5
Cormac
“Well, colour me shocked. She did it.”
“Of course she did,” Aidan says confidently.
“She got around Goliath.”
“Knew she would.”
“Fuck you,” I say, turning to face him. “You didn’t know fuck all. You were as nervous as we were waiting for her to burst out of the earth like it spat her out.”
Aidan’s jaw tightens. Just a fraction. Just enough for me to know I’ve hit the nerve, because I always hit the nerve.
He won’t admit it, though. He’d rather chew glass than confess he was sweating it out in the dark with the rest of us, watching that hole in the ground and counting seconds like they were heartbeats.
“I had faith,” he says, smooth as silk over a blade.
“Faith.” I let the word sit between us like something rotten. “You don’t have faith. You have calculations, which are sometimes wrong.”
“Not this time. She made it out, and they said she passed. Whatever she experienced down there was not fun for her.”
“Was it fun for any of us?”
“I think they made it worse,” he says, crouching down, with that look on his face that says he will murder anyone who hurts her.
“Because of who she is.”
“Because of who her dad was,” Declan says quietly from the shadows.
He’s right. Cillian Callaghan cast a long shadow, and his daughter just crawled through the dark end of it with bleeding hands and a mouth that won’t quit. That combination is either going to get her killed or make her untouchable. I know which one I’m betting on.
I stand up from where I’ve been crouching behind the yew tree and roll my neck until it cracks.
My fists are still balled, and I force them open, flexing fingers that have been clenched since she disappeared into the Old Chapel.
I don’t like admitting that. I don’t like the way my body reacted—the tension in my chest, the urge to burst in and go in after her when the minutes started ticking past three.
I’ve watched people go through the gauntlet before.
I did it myself three years ago, and I remember every second of it.
The dark. The cold. The feeling that the walls were alive and hungry.
We were placed in the hierarchy based on who did it the fastest. Of course, Aidan won; we all knew he would.
I was third. Declan was second, and only because he went right instead of left.
Shorter tunnel, same outcome. Troy, the dickhead, was fourth.
I shake my head at the memory of his gloating over the other students. Such a prick.
“This is different,” I say slowly. “That should’ve been the end of it. She should’ve been timed and placed. They’re not letting her go.”
“They have bigger plans for her,” Aidan says. “They know why she is here, and they want to break her.”
“They won’t.” The words come out of me like a vow, low and certain, and I don’t even realise I’ve said them until both Aidan and Declan turn to look at me. I don’t take them back. I meant every syllable.
Aidan watches me, his eyes catching what little light there is. The look lasts just long enough to make me want to check if my fly is down. Then he nods. Once. Like I’ve just confirmed something he already suspected about me, and he’s filing it away for later use.
“They won’t,” he agrees. “Because we won’t let them.”
I don’t do gentle.
I do quick. I do brutal. I do finished.
But watching her come out of the ground with blood on her hands makes one rule click into place in my head like a lock. No one gets to hurt her unless she chooses it.
And if they try anyway, I’ll make it a lesson the whole campus remembers.
Declan’s fingers are wrapped around the iron railing of the half-fallen-down chapel fence like he’s debating whether to rip it free and use it as a weapon. His eyes are bright with something that isn’t quite rage but lives in the same neighbourhood. “Are we going in?”
“No.” Aidan stands.
“That would undermine everything she has proven so far. It’s not our fight,” I add.
“Not yet,” Aidan corrects, which is a distinction that matters. He’s already three moves ahead, running scenarios in that calculating brain of his. I can practically hear the gears turning.
We wait. The night is cold enough that my breath fogs in front of me, and I shove my hands into the pockets of my jacket.
The Old Chapel sits there like a crouched animal, candlelight bleeding through the narrow windows in thin orange lines.
Whatever’s happening inside, it’s quiet.
No screaming, no sounds of a fight. I don’t know if that’s reassuring or worse.
The sound of a door opening pulls my attention back to the chapel.
The candlelight spills across the grass again, and I see her silhouette in the doorway.
She’s standing, which is more than some manage after the gauntlet.
Her body language is rigid, locked tight, the posture of someone holding themselves together through sheer bloody-mindedness.
I know that posture. I’ve worn it myself, usually right before I put someone through a wall.
She steps out into the night air and stops. Her hands hang at her sides. Her hair has come loose from the bun, dark strands sticking to her neck and jaw. She’s soaked from the waist up, and the black top clings to her in ways I shouldn’t be noticing right now but absolutely am.
She tips her head back and breathes in deeply. “Fine,” she says. “Let’s get this over with.”
They move off, all seven of them, and we glance at each other before we move out, following them at a distance.
They take the path that skirts the east boundary wall, moving in a tight formation with Dervla somewhere in the middle.
The robes make it hard to pick her out at this distance, but I track her by the way she moves—slightly off-kilter, favouring her right side, but refusing to slow down.
She’s hurt. Not badly enough to stop, but enough that every step costs her something she won’t show.
The path curves away from the chapel and into the tree line. I know this route. It leads down to the old boathouse on the lake, a stone building that hasn’t housed a boat in decades but serves other purposes that the university prospectus conveniently forgets to mention.
“The lake,” I grit out. “Fuck that.”
Aidan catches my arm before I can storm past him into the trees. “Use your head.”
“My head says if they throw her in that water, I start breaking bones.”
“They won’t kill her,” Declan says.
Aidan’s gaze stays fixed on the procession ahead. “No. They’ll try to scare her. Humiliate her. See where she cracks.”
“She doesn’t strike me as the cracking type.”
“No,” Aidan says softly. “She strikes me as the kind who burns the whole room down first.”
That gets a grim smile out of me.
We follow, silent now, boots sinking into the damp earth where the path turns from stone to mud. The trees crowd in thicker here, old and twisted, their branches blotting out what little moonlight there is. The lake appears in flashes through the trunks. Black water. Flat as glass. Creepy as fuck.
The boathouse comes into view at the edge of the water, squat and dark, built from the same old stone as the chapel.
One lantern burns above the door. Another hangs from a hook by the lake wall, throwing a weak yellow smear across the surface.
The whole place looks abandoned except for the six robed figures and the girl in the middle of them.
Dervla stops when they stop.
Even from here, I can see she’s pissed off. Her chin is up. Her hands are flexing at her sides like she’s one insult away from swinging at someone. Wet clothes, hair half-fallen down, blood on her palms.
She is fucking gorgeous, and she will be ours after she survives this.